Serial ATA (SATA) Protocol

Serial ATA (SATA) is an evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. SATA offers much faster communication and easier configuration at about the same price as its parallel predecessor.

This new bus is backed by some of the storage industry's largest players. New Serial ATA products are on the market now, with the promise of a new wave of storage products such as hard disk drives, CDs, DVDs, and tape drives.

The major advantages to Serial ATA are:

Scalability: ATA is a point-to-point connection and allows multiple ports to be aggregated into a single controller, either built onto the mother board or as an add-on.

Price: SATA was created with desktop PC prices in mind. The options that SATA provides will give consumers a lower total cost solution as capacity and throughput requirements increase.

Cabling: SATA cables are a thin point-to-point connection which allows for easy cable routing within a computer system, without the need for daisy-chaining.

Performance: Serial ATA provides 1.5 Gb/sec (150MB/sec) of performance for each drive within an array.

To learn more about Serial ATA, please visit the Serial ATA Working Group's web site at www.serialata.org.